Ready to freeze hungry in the dark?

If you still doubt that intellectual and moral folly can produce tangible practical disasters, consider the looming energy crisis.

Sorry, did I say ‘looming’? No, the crisis is already upon us, escalating out of sight. Some analysts are already uttering macabre predictions, along the lines of the title above.

Even people who have never read a line of Shakespeare (or, for that matter, Steinbeck) are talking about “the winter of our discontent”. Alas, there is no sun of York rising to turn the gloom into a glorious summer.

Those who eschew literary references invoke the 1973 three-day-week debacle brought to Britain courtesy of another incompetent Tory government. This seems to be a distinct possibility this winter, which would work wonders for the economy, especially against the backdrop of a new lockdown.

Dozens of small energy companies are already going to the wall, with the magic words ‘government bailout’ wafting through the air. Assuming that it happens, who do you think will bear the brunt of such charity? But of course. The government will offset its generosity by new tax raids on the grateful public, a stratagem well-rehearsed and fine-tuned.

At the heart of the crisis is wokery, an urgent desire to signal virtue by touting the global warming hoax as man-made reality. When that canard first began to flap its wings, any sensible statesman should have asked two vital questions. First, is it true? (No, is the scientifically unimpeachable reply.) Second, what can we do about it? (Nothing.)

Yet successive British governments, including the one fronted by Mr and Mrs Johnson (you decide who is functionally which in that marriage), have proved that both sensibility and statesmanship are extinct in our government. Rather than thinking of bono publico, they’ve concentrated on their own bono, understood as an ability to outwoke one another.

To be fair, our government isn’t the only one. All the wokers of the world stand united in this idiocy, ready to sacrifice the wellbeing of the people at the altar of pernicious ideology. Never in history have so many been sacrificed by so few for something so nebulous.

I shan’t repeat myself, or rather the serious scientists I tend to quote, by restating the arguments that shoot down the canard of anthropogenic global warming. But the eggs laid by that bird are worth smashing one by one.

The ultimate goal stated by the Johnsons is to eliminate carbon emissions altogether. That means getting rid of fossil fuels, replacing them with sun and wind, the fickle energy sources predating the Industrial Revolution.

Since our economy post-dates the Industrial Revolution, it’s driven by just such fuels: oil, gas and coal. The only currently practical alternative to hydrocarbons is nuclear but, courtesy of hysterical left-wing propaganda, it’s invariably seen against the backdrop of Hiroshima. This, though no one in the West has ever died as a result of an accident at a nuclear plant.

Hence both Germany and France are phasing out their nuclear power stations, leaving a gaping hole in their energy supplies (in France, up to 80 per cent of all energy is nuclear-generated). Since six per cent of our energy is mainlined from France, the tremor of that tectonic shift is reaching us too.

Yet our indomitable PM, the star of the Carrie On films, isn’t going to pay attention to such mundane matters. He wants to look good at parties with his wife’s friends, who are rapidly becoming his as well.

To that end, he has committed Britain to the patently unachievable goal of replacing all normal cars with electric Go Carts by 2030. Meanwhile, he is hanging on to the 23 per cent ‘green’ levy on domestic gas, which would hurt most people even by itself.

But this tax grab isn’t doing its destructive work by itself. It’s amply complemented by Col. Putin, thanks to whose price fixing gas is now 250 per cent dearer than it was in January.

Now, Putin’s government is a self-avowed enemy of the West. Hence, it takes irresponsibility bordering on treason to allow Russia to weaponise energy, using her oil and gas for political blackmail. One would think Western leaders would bang their heads together, trying to figure out how to knock that weapon out of their enemy’s hands.

Instead, they are doing exactly the opposite. The EU, tacitly supported by the Biden administration, is pushing aside every barrier in the path of the new Russian gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. When it starts operating, Germany, to name one EU member, will get practically all her gas from Russia, as opposed to the current 49 per cent.

The present tensions with France ought to have alerted the Johnsons to the danger of relying even on friends for the supply of a vital strategic resource. As to relying on enemies, I’m not sure I can find polite words to describe that death wish.

Here we get two idiocies for the price of one. Idiocy One: Europe, including, if only vicariously, the UK, is increasingly dependent for its energy on a hostile foreign power. Idiocy Two: this, though there is no need for such dependence.

Parts of Europe, including Britain and especially France, have practically unlimited deposits of shale gas underfoot. This resource, however, remains untapped – first, because hydrocarbons are the work of the anti-woke devil; second, because extracting shale gas by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is seen as yet another blow in the face of ‘our planet’.

The Johnsons must have played truant when science was taught at their schools. Had they been present and correct, they’d be more cautious in their campaign to eliminate every molecule of  CO₂ from Britain’s ‘green’ and therefore increasingly unpleasant land.

Not only does carbon make up some 18 per cent of human body mass, it’s also essential for every form of biological life. Periods of the greatest prosperity in history have coincided with high levels of carbon emissions, which make plants grow more plentiful and luxuriant.

Shortages in CO₂ emissions, on the other hand, have always led to famines. I doubt that a real famine is on the cards this winter, but our chemical plants are already struggling to produce enough carbon-based fertilisers.

If energy prices double by this winter, as most experts confidently predict they will, low agricultural yields and the suffering of the transportation industry will combine to produce food shortages. How severe I can’t tell, but one already has to display more creativity than before trying to replace essential ingredients disappearing from supermarket shelves.

In spite of that, the Johnsons are steadfast in their refusal to get rid of the ruinous green levy. As to accepting that their whole green agenda is as foolhardy as it is incidious, this would be akin to a pious Muslim agreeing that there is a God other than Allah, and Mohammad isn’t his prophet.

The current situation, claim the Johnsons against both logic and empirical evidence, won’t hurt the people. No? Well then, perhaps they should consider rat poison instead.